Un-Substantive

There was a meeting last week about the doomed project. It didn't go well.

As I've said, we got back many times as much feedback on an informal review as we expected or wanted. Because of this, we now think the project will take longer than the last estimate. We (and by "we" I mean H., who did all the talking for the group in last week's meeting) asked our supervisors for more time. They did let us push back the deadlines somewhat, but not as much as we think we need.

During the meeting I kept on thinking "yes, but..." as H. talked. Nitpicking. Not substantive disagreements, but places where I would have said things differently, whether for diplomatic reasons or more strict honesty or some other reason. For example, she said that more than two-thirds of the 350 comments we got were substantive. Really? Well, OK, it's technically accurate. If we do something in five different places and a reviewer didn't like it and changed it in each of those places, that's arguably five different substantive comments. If two different reviewers asked slightly different questions about the same part, then that's two substantive comments, even if in the end we only make one change to that part. That's a bit misleading, though, because those situations are rarely hard to handle. We know what to do about things like that, it's just a matter of exactly how to do it. So there's "substantive" meaning "we need to do something about it individually", which really does describe more than two-thirds of the 350 comments (and for that matter probably nine-tenths of them), and then there's "substantive" meaning "we don't know what to do about it yet", which probably describes about a tenth of them.

The thing is, in my opinion it would be disastrous to give our bosses the one-tenth figure. Because the real problem, at least in my opinion, isn't the comments. It's the known unknowns. The changes that keep being asked for. Interpersonal conflicts on a 20-person team. The problems that looked minor at first but now seem bigger than everything else combined. It's ridiculous how things keep on getting thrown in or we have to backtrack on things that we thought were settled. Every deadline and milestone in the timeline so far has been the most optimistic projection reasonable (and, sometimes, plainly unreasonable from the start) and has been missed. Last week, we tried presenting more realistic timeline. Our bosses said no thanks, they prefer the most optimistic possible option. So instead of the additional nine months we asked for, we got something more like four months.

This is not the main reason I call the project doomed, but it certainly doesn't help.